There is something seriously wrong with the news media in the United States right now. Cable news pretty much calls all the shots while radio and print newsrooms are shrinking and the reporters that remain are being asked to produce content across multiple mediums. All the while the public, lethargically sucks their news through a straw, wonders why elected officials are corrupt but never bothers to ask them same question of the fourth estate.

The Columbia Journalism Review posted a feature to their website, titled The Nonprofit Road, that denounces the status quo while offering a reasonable but currently untenable solution to the problem of corporate news. This article is excellent read for anyone who is looking for, or working towards, an alternative.

“Never has there been a greater need for independent, original, credible information about our complex society and the world at large. Never has technology better enabled the instantaneous global transmission of pictures, sounds, and words to communicate such reporting. But all this is occurring in a time of absentee owners, harvested investments, hollowed-out newsrooms, and thus a diminished capacity to adequately find and tell the stories. The standard euphemism to characterize these peculiar times is that the news media are undergoing a historic “transformation,” which is certainly true. What has also been true for years now is that media corporations are desperately seeking a way to remain viable financially in the wild marketplace of, well, everything else. And at the moment, the landscape looks precarious, particularly for serious editors and reporters.

“In the past couple of years alone, everything but a piano has fallen on the head of the serious press: Rupert Murdoch bought Dow Jones and The Wall Street Journal; Knight Ridder, the nation’s most Pulitzer-honored newspaper chain, was dismantled; the McClatchy Company sold the Minneapolis Star Tribune to a private equity firm for less than half of its purchase price eight years earlier; and hundreds of reporters and editors accepted buyout offers at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Boston Globe, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, The Dallas Morning News, the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, and many other newspapers.”

Here is the whole thing.